Roundup: Digging up the Past

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"Ancient Ancestors Come to Life," National Geographic, January 3, 2014

See our ancient ancestors come to life through paleoartist John Gurche's realistic human likenesses for the Smithsonian's Hall of Human Origins.

"The human story is really nothing short of the story of a little corner of the universe becoming aware of itself," says Gurche.>>>

Louise Iles, "Year in digs: How 2013 looked in archaeology," BBC, December 31, 2013

. . . . This year's research also gave us a glimpse into the private lives of our hominid cousins, reopening debates that might shed light on the evolution of our species.

The first complete Neanderthal genome was published, at the same time showing inbreeding within Neanderthal groups as well as reports of interbreeding between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans.>>>

Christmas Creep and Other Joyous Holiday Traditions

[We repost this piece by Eric Schultz, which originally appeared on November 19, 2013.]
Eric B. Schultz

Not long ago, a friend sent me a video which featured a new holiday character, “Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus,” with a note saying how appalled he was with the way retailers had hijacked

the holidays.

I’m pretty jaded myself by holiday retailers. But even I’ve winced a few times this fall.  There was the Christmas wrapping-paper sale I stumbled upon in mid-October, for example, and the recent news that many large retailers would be opening their doors at 8 or 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving evening.  (Who’s going to eat cold turkey sandwiches with me?)  Now, I’d been introduced to the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus offering proof positive that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas had finally been smashed together into the twisted wreckage of one long retail extravaganza.

Remember the time when Christmas was simple and less commercial, when you could step out of your door into a Currier and Ives print.  No?  How about a $29 Thomas Kinkade “Memories of Christmas” print?  Precisely.  One of the greatest of all holiday traditions is recalling a holiday season—historian Stephen Nissenbaum reminds us in his superb book, The Battle For Christmas—that never existed at all.

Newport Stories: To Preserve or Not to Preserve, or, On the Million-Dollar Question about Newport’s (and All) Historic Homes

[Here is the fifth and final installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies.]

Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too!

The Breakers.

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality, depth, and breadth of the self-guided audio tour at The Breakers—that tour, to be clear, provided starting points for all five of this week’s blog topics—but was particularly taken aback, in a good way, by a provocative question raised right at the tour’s outset. The narrator asks directly whether preserving mansions like The Breakers is a worthwhile pursuit for an organization such as the Preservation Society of Newport County—whether such mansions are architecturally or artistically worth preserving, whether they are historically or culturally worth remembering, whether, in short, these kinds of homes merit the obvious expense and effort that are required to keep them open and accessible to visitors. The tour presents arguments on both sides of the question, and leaves it up to the listener to decide as he or she continues with his or her visit.

In Small Things Forgotten Redux

Robin Fleming

Sometimes the most unimpressive objects, like this little Romano-British ceramic pot, found in Baldock, in Hertfordshire (in the UK), can speak volumes about the lives of long forgotten individuals. To appreciate the value of this pot, which was manufactured in the 4th century but still in use in the 5th, we need a little context. Although Britain in 300 CE was as Roman as any province in the Empire, within a single generation of the year 400, urban life, industrial-scale manufacturing of basic goods, the money economy, and the state had collapsed. Because of these dislocations ubiquitous, inexpensive, utterly common everyday objects––including mass-produced, wheel-thrown pots like this one––began to disappear.

The dislocations caused by the loss of such pottery were immense, and it is easy to imagine the ways the disappearance of cheap, readily available pots would have affected the running of kitchens, the rhythms of daily work and the eating of meals. But pots like our pot had also long been central in funerary rites, and the fact that they were no longer being made must have caused heartache and anxiety for bereaved families preparing for the burial of a loved one in the brave new world of post-Roman Britain.

Baldock, the site of our find––which, in the 4th century had been a lively small town with a hardworking population of craftsmen and traders––ceased in the early 5th century to be a town, and in the decades after 400 it lost most of its population. Still, a few people continued to bury their dead in the former settlement’s old Roman cemetery.

During the Roman period, a number of typical Romano-British funerary rites had been practiced here, including postmortem decapitation (with the head of the dead person placed carefully between the feet of the corpse!) and hobnail-boot burial. Most of the dead during the Roman period were placed in the ground in nailed coffins, and a number were accompanied in their graves by domestic fowl and mass-produced, wheel-thrown pots, many of them color-coated beakers like our pot.

The Dressmaker, the Mob, and the Fashionable Housewife*

Nicole White

“What is the most decadent thing anybody could ever do? Get all dressed up, do their make up, and stay at home.” -Marc Jacobs

Jazz music, speakeasies, flappers, and the mob were all part of Kansas City in the 1920s, but the Paris of the Plains was also swarming with creativity and innovation. In the early twenties, Walt Disney started an animation company called Laugh-O-gram Films on E. 31st Street in Kansas City where he created black and white animated short films based on classic fairytales. He befriended a small mouse in the building, which was said to have inspired his creation of Mickey Mouse. Later that decade, Ernest Hemingway, who had previously worked for the Kansas City Star, drove his wife back to the city for the birth of their second child while, at the same time, he was putting the finishing touches on one of his greatest masterpieces, A Farewell to Arms. And just around the corner, dressmaker Nell Donnelly Reed was making her mark in history.

Nell, born in 1889, grew up in the humble town of Parsons, Kansas and developed an interest in sewing at a young age. After moving to Kansas City and marrying Paul Donnelly, she quickly grew tired of cooking, cleaning, and handling other day-to-day domestic minutiae in the unflattering, drab clothing available to middle-class housewives. She asked herself, "Why not put a frill on it, the way I do on my holiday aprons?" As a result, Nell quickly reinvented the house dress in a way that would have made June Cleaver swoon. Her friends and family were so smitten by her dresses that they encouraged her to start a business. Nell told the New York Times, "I'll make women look pretty when they are washing dishes." And she did just that.

Field Trip: A Report from the Bright Side of Fourth-Grade History Education

Chris Beneke

Guided tour at Lowell National Park. 
Photo courtesy of www.nps.gov/lowe

If the experiences of my kids are at all representative, the glum accounts you’ve heard or read about elementary and secondary education in the U.S. have some basis in fact. Public school students move in virtual lock-step with their classmates, get a meager fifteen minutes for recess, and take tests with unsettling regularity. Meanwhile, their hardworking teachers and principals must manage both rigid curriculum standards and large classes.

In light of these oft-repeated concerns, my perspective brightened last week while chaperoning my son’s fourth-grade class trip to the Lowell National Park, the splendid and well-preserved site of the famous textile mills where America’s industrial revolution took off in the 1830s and 1840s. I didn’t come away feeling like a Finnish parent probably feels after accompanying his or her child on a field trip. Still, the experience left me much more optimistic about the trajectory of early history education: the kids arrived well-prepared and the museum’s activities were engaging, hands-on, well-paced, and occasionally revelatory.

American Pickers: An Appreciation

Jonathan Rees

Most of the history professors I know refuse to admit that they ever watch the History Channel, but I’ve become hooked on one show in particular. The concept of American Pickers couldn’t be simpler. The program features Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz as they travel across the country, looking for antiques to stock in their two “Antique Archeology” stores (located in LeClaire, Iowa, and Nashville, Tennessee). Sometimes they get calls from the home office telling them where to go, sometimes they go “free-styling.” That means walking up to

houses with lots of old cars or advertising signs out front and asking if they can look around. When they find something they like, negotiations begin. Often, at the end of the episode, a particularly mysterious item gets appraised to see how much the guys will profit from it if they can sell it at market price.

Obviously, the concept owes something of a debt to Antiques Roadshow, but the reason I like this show much better is the obvious enthusiasm that these guys have for all the objects that they’re selling. The “contestants” on Roadshow generally only want to know about their items to figure out how much money they can make, but Mike and Frank can get incredibly excited over objects for aesthetic reasons alone, whether they end up buying them for their stores or not. Even if you’ll never make any money from what’s stuffed inside your garage, you can’t help but feel the thrill when they discover “rusty gold” of all kinds. I expected to see car parts and motorcycles when I started watching, but I’ve also learned more about toys, bicycles, beer, petroliana (see the clip above if you don’t recognize the term)—even surfing—than I ever thought possible. Mike and Frank learn as they go so that they can spot diamonds in the rough on later journeys, and you can’t help but learn with them.

Unsafe in Candy Land

Eric Schultz

Recently, while researching material on an entrepreneur who launched her candy business at the turn of the twentieth century, I bumped into a series of newspapers articles that reminded me that the past really is a foreign (and often dangerous) land.

In 1900, America’s candy manufacturers boasted $100 million in invested capital and an annual business in candies and sweets that exceeded that of beer, wine and liquor combined.   A British newspaper declared that Americans “make their sweets as we make our bread, practically for a day’s consumption.”  In the days before the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, this extraordinary demand for all things sweet attracted swindlers, quacks and crooks.

The damage done was fathomless.  I uncovered article after article about children sickened and killed by adulterated candies throughout the 1890s and early 1900s.  Techniques used by manufacturers were often beyond the pale. Some candy was found to contain fusel oil (an ingredient used at the time in lacquer solvents). Other manufacturers cut their honey with glucose, brightened candies with the use of aniline colors (used in the manufacture of the precursors to polyurethane), and added terra cotta (a clay more often used to make bricks) for bulk and color.  In 1900, the Committee on Manufactures of the U.S. Senate found that condensed milk was among the most commonly adulterated products--except for perhaps extracts of fruit and vanilla, so suspect that only one manufacturer was even willing to allow a factory inspection.

Early Color Film

Heather Cox Richardson

In the late 1930s, Charles Cushman began to experiment with color film. For the next three decades, his photos documented the technological and social changes in America in striking images.

The images bring home the human dimension of history. Tractors didn’t just replace horse-drawn carts; farmers driving tractors down dirt roads passed farmers driving their horse-drawn carts the other way. Seeing the men in Cushman’s images brings home the human element imbedded in historical change. It’s impossible not to imagine the pride of the farmer with the new-fangled tractor as he sports the newest technology past his less-well-off neighbor, and to suspect that the man with the horses feels both left behind and superior to the man who has jumped on the latest fad. The photos draw you—and with luck, students—in, putting human experience of the twentieth century’s momentous changes front and center.

They are well worth a look.

Race, Place, and Jesus in American History: An Interview with Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum

Conducted by Hilde Løvdal and Randall Stephens

Hilde Løvdal and Randall Stephens: Why did the two of you take on this project, which became your book, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (UNC Press, 2012)?

Paul Harvey and Ed Blum: On one level, the book began the first times we recognized that the Jesus images surrounding us in churches, Sunday schools, and on movie screens had histories. The book came from that feeling of dissonance when we saw representations of Jesus as white and knew, somehow, in our guts that it just wasn’t right.

On another level, the book emerged from years of studying independently the links between race and religion. We determined that it was time to take on the biggest symbol in the United States when it came to both: Jesus himself. We had read Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, FSG, 2003, loved it, but felt like it missed how profoundly race transformed imagery of Jesus and how much the racial images of Jesus influenced American history. When discussing our book idea with Martin Marty, he asked what it would look like to write a racially integrated story of Jesus as opposed to the ways Prothero segregated race into a few chapters. When we did that, we found profoundly complicated stories that not only featured racial conflict, but also demonstrated cross-racial exchange.

We started the book before we even met in person. Ed had reviewed Paul’s book Freedom’s Coming for H-NET and asked how the book would have looked different if it took into account art, literature, film, and material culture. At that point, we struck up an email conversation and planned an edited volume on race, religion, Jesus, and material culture. As we talked more and met every six months as part of the Young Scholars in American Religion, we decided that there was a monograph to be written. Six years later (and several very different iterations of the book thanks to amazing peer reviewers), we have the book!

Løvdal and Stephens: What is your intended audience for the book?

Harvey and Blum:

1. American historians. We both love our profession and the people in it, and this book connects to the major themes in American history that we teach from colonization and slavery to suburbia and the information age.

2. Students of American history and US religious history. We wrote the book in ways that our undergraduate students could understand, and we even created a website for the book – www.colorofchrist.com with hundreds of images, primary sources, songs, discussion questions, syllabi, and powerpoint presentations – for students and teachers to read the book, analyze it, and create their own research agendas from it.

3. Scholars of religion in the United States. Too often, religious history is written as separate from the broader trends of the overall discipline or focuses too much on ideas. We joined the many wonderful US religious historians who have been looking to connect our sub-discipline to the bigger points of the profession and to show how religion influenced all forms of society, culture, politics, and life.

4. Thoughtful religious leaders and people who want to know the stories behind the Jesus imagery they see around them and be able to make new choices about how they talk about their faith and display it.

Løvdal and Stephens: Several other prominent religious history scholars have worked on Jesus in America. You mention the influence of Prothero.  What about other scholars like Richard Wightman Fox (Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession, HarperCollins, 2004) when you wrote this book?

Harvey and Blum: Absolutely, although the book that first influenced us was Kelly Brown Douglas’s The Black Christ, which was a short, but wonderful, study of African American perspectives on Jesus from slavery through the works of black liberationist James Cone and womanist Delores Williams. These three books were always in the forefront of our thought. We have used and incorporated material from these authors, and thank them in the acknowledgements.

At the same time, we felt we had a different story to tell. On certain points, especially the impact of power and access to media resources in terms of how Jesus is represented in American history, we challenge some of the arguments that Fox and Prothero make. Both works tend to suggest that Jesus always has been made over in the image of the maker. But in The Color of Christ, we show that this is not simply the case. Jesus was made both like and unlike communities, and the “I-Thou” distinctions mattered.  Moreover, many people throughout US history have not had the representational power or means to create Jesus in their image and have transformed him in other profound ways.

We think the main difference between our book and those of Prothero and Fox is encapsulated by our different covers. While they present Jesus either as a larger-than-life air balloon or the different icons, we focus squarely on how people - everyone from teenagers in Brooklyn to presidents in the White House - have lived with the material realities of Jesus in their midst.

Løvdal and Stephens: How can a local understanding or regional understanding of Jesus say something about a national view?

Harvey and Blum: Local and regional factors are paramount to The Color of Christ. We place a lot of emphasis in the work (just to give one example to answer the question) on Jesus in the South. In many ways, the Jesus of the South – a suffering saint – became a dominant American Jesus. Ironically, that Jesus was formed first in the worldview of slaves and abolitionists. “The Christ of American civilization is the slave,” one abolitionist wrote. Many historians have suggested that the proslavery argument won the “battle for the Bible,” since slavery in general can easily be defended reading the Bible in the common-sense way that people did in the 19th century (and many do today).

But we point out that while slaveowners may have won the battle for the Bible, slaves and abolitionists won the joust for Jesus. After the war, that “southern Jesus” was reclaimed by whites; the very term for the overturning of Reconstruction, “Redemption,” suggests that white southerners saw their postwar political struggle as a kind of cleansing of a sin that had stained their region. Their triumph came to be represented symbolically in the famous closing sequence of Birth of a Nation, where the Aryan Jesus blesses the victory of the heroic Klan over the demonic forces of carpetbaggers and their black allies.

Then, later in the twentieth century, black artists (including a number of southern folk artists discussed in the book) and civil rights activists reclaimed Jesus once again, turning him once again into a figure empathetic to the black southern freedom struggle. This is best represented in Clementine Hunter’s magnificient painting “Cotton Crucifixion,” which depicts the crucified Jesus hanging over a mule-powered wagon full of cotton.

The West (or Wests) is critically important too. For Native American messianic movements, such as Wovoka’s Ghost Dance, the appeal of a neo-Christ who would bring back the Buffalo was tied to their frontier experiences. And the climate of southern California was instrumental in making Hollywood into the twentieth-century hub of Jesus media production. By having more than 300 days per year of good filming weather, southern California and Hollywood played a vital role in transforming how Jesus was presented physically and geographically.

Løvdal and Stephens: How did you want your story to unfold from one era to another or from one generation to another?

Harvey and Blum: We structured the book by era and it is divided into three parts: “Born Across the Sea” (colonial period to the Civil War) “Crucified and Resurrected” (Civil War to World War I) and “Ascended and Still Ascending” (1920s to the present). Each part tells a different story. Most importantly, we want to show the “long duree” of images (or the lack thereof) of Jesus in American history. The dearth of imagery among Protestants in early America, for example, meant that what imagery that existed came mostly from Catholics and was, literally, “born across the sea.” Even in the “age of visions” – the First Great Awakening – Jesus often appeared as a sort of ineffable brightness, not something that could be described in physical terms. In the 19th century, the Jesus that we are all familiar with was born and disseminated through the religious voluntary agencies, and their attendant means of mass production, that came with the evangelical explosion of that era. This Jesus was crucified in the turmoil of the Civil War, but resurrected after to bless the reunion of the country (and to bless white supremacy, we argue).

The Head of Christ (1941) Warner Sallman

Then, in the final part which focuses on the last 100 years or so, we trace the “ascendancy” of omnipresent Jesus imagery, from Warner Sallman’s ubiquitous “Head of Christ” (and countless imitations and parodies of it), to Jesus in literature, film, and music, and finally to Jesus in contemporary humor (movies, “South Park,” and the like). The mass media of the twentieth century (and into the social media revolution of the 21st) have made Jesus inescapable globally, even as the meanings of his imagery have become almost impossibly tangled with the history of that imagery. The white Jesus survives through all this turmoil, but he is, we say, “white without words.” In short, the white Jesus is the “default” image, to which all others ultimately must defer, even in positions of challenge or parody.

Løvdal and Stephens: Could you say something about the malleability of the image of Jesus? How can Jesus appear so different depending on who is using his image?

Harvey and Blum: Great question, and that is really the heart of the book. We can best answer that by mentioning the three main myths our book explores about Jesus imagery and shifting appearances. First, there is a myth that humans create God or gods (especially Jesus) in their own image. This myth claims that people invariably represent Jesus to look like themselves. So whites make a white Jesus, blacks a black one, Asians an Asian one. But American history shows this is not true, and the myth hides how much racial groups have interacted and affected one another throughout U.S. history. No racial group in the United States has been separate enough to form distinct and impenetrable religious cultures. Moreover, lots of people have worshiped Christ figures that look nothing like them. For centuries, African Americans and Native Americans embraced white images of Jesus, debated them in their midst, and tried to replace them but generally did not. The myth hides the powers of money, of technological access, and of production capabilities. Slaves did not have the time or the manufacturing power to make or market pictures of Jesus as a black man, but they were inundated with images of white Christ figures. And then it gets even more complicated. When the white Jesus helped slaves run to freedom, he was defying white supremacy. So even racial images can be used to work against racism.

The second myth is that the United States has always been a "Jesus nation" or a "Christian nation." When we take seriously discussions of the race and color of Christ, we find that Jesus has been a lightning rod for struggle, conflict, and tension. For every occasion where someone makes Jesus into an icon of entrepreneurial salesmanship, as Bruce Barton did with his bestselling book of the 1920s The Man Nobody Knows, there are other Americans who have made Jesus a lynch victim (like W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes did in the 1930s), as a Native American who promised the defeat of the whites and the return of the Buffalo (as Wovoka did), or as a socialist who would get beat up by American mobs (as muckraker Upton Sinclair did). Jesus has not defined American culture; he has purely been at the center of the titanic and oftentimes bloody struggles over what the culture would be.

The third myth is that liberation theology emerged in the 1960s and was primarily a northern, black male phenomenon. This myth went into full blast during the Reverend Jeremiah Wright debacle of the 2008 presidential campaign when he could be heard on cable television and YouTube videos shouting "God damn America" and "Jesus was black." Media outlets searched for the genesis of these ideas and they turned to the 1960s. They located the work of James Cone as most influential and connected him to Wright and then Wright to Obama.

But liberation theology has a much longer history, and that history included Native Americans, women, and whites far more than the short history lets on. As early as the 1830s, some white Americans, black Americans, and Native Americans challenged expressly the whiteness of Jesus and several presented Jesus as on the side of disempowered people. In the present, there are many non-blacks who use darkened images of Jesus and some white artists even create them.

Advice to Farmers

Dan Allosso

People have been giving advice to farmers throughout American history.  Sometimes farmers themselves have written about their favorite techniques or innovations, but often experts have tried to compile the “best practices” of the past and add new ideas developed by scientists and technologists.  The progressive era amped up this process, and turned the USDA and land grant “Agricultural and Technical” universities into big producers of information for rural people.

But that process is a story for another day.  Today, what caught my attention is an old (1880) book I found in the UMass library stacks, called Farming for Profit (online here).  Written by John Elliot Read (who claims in the introduction to be “a practical farmer, acquainted with the details of farm management, and thoroughly used to manual labor”), the book promises to show “How to Make Money and Secure Health and Happiness on the Farm.”  I think it’s interesting that even a volume designed to be an “Encyclopedic” and “Comprehensive” source of “Mechanics” and “Business Principles” in 1880 puts the rural lifestyle front and center.

Farming for Profit is a fascinating combination of late-nineteenth century technique and culture—both of which can be compared with what came after.  At some point, I’m going to make a more thorough study of how the two elements of farm tech and farm life changed over time.  For right now, I thought these items were interesting:

In the illustration at the top, across from the title-page of the book, we get a more or less classical view of farm life—not of technology.  There are no new machines in the picture, and the buildings don’t even seem to be in the best repair.  The impression I get is of an ancient and venerable way of life.  Peaceful, slow-moving, and dignified.  Later in the book, there are more practical illustrations, like this diagram of an ideal farmstead.  And in another illustration, we see more evidence of a transition in farming: the first view is of corn plants (old-fashioned ones, not the super-hybrids we're used to seeing today) that have been “drilled or planted,” while the second shows corn planted in hills.  Hill-planting was the old technique colonists learned from the Indians, so it’s interesting that it still finds its way into a manual from 1880.  That suggests that maybe the author was a practical farmer with lots of experience in the fields. 

Wartime Swimsuits Storm the Beaches

This piece is cross-posted from Iron as Needed.

Nicole White

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"During World War II, the pinup girl became popular. And wearing a skimpy swimsuit was patriotic -- it was considered doing your part for the war effort."
                                                    -Anna Cole, swimwear designer

Ava Gardner, Actress/Pin-up Girl

As enthusiastic crowds flock to sandy beaches this summer, swimsuits will be disappearing from store racks at a rapid rate. Once very modest and made of impractical fabrics such as wool, women's beachwear has drastically evolved since the early 1900s.

In the 1920s, Coco Chanel popularized the "sun tan" when she spent a bit too much time in the French Riviera and returned with a sun-kissed glow. Chanel's accidental tan was reason enough for women everywhere to adopt lying in the sun for leisure as a new form of relaxation. This hot new trend did wonders for the fashion world of swimwear.
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Esther Williams Poolside in 1944

It was in the early 1940s, when war rationing extended to fabric, that the two-piece swimsuit baring some midriff really took off. Designers shortened tops and removed the extra skirt panel covering the thighs to save on fabric consumption, but still kept the navel strategically covered with a high-waisted bottom. Wartime pin-up girls like Ava Gardner, Esther Williams, and Rita Hayworth gained attention and heightened the popularity of these swimsuits among young females. 

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Cole of California
Wartime Swimsuit Ad 

Fred Cole, a silent film actor and founder of Cole of California, transformed his family's knit underwear business into a swimwear success by bringing Hollywood glamour to the beach. During the war, Cole of California also made parachutes for the Air Force and marketed this tidbit in their swimsuit ads to boost sales among patriotic Americans.

When asked about upcoming swim fashions for an issue of The Evening Independent published on November 15, 1945, Cole said, "We want to keep 'em bare, but flattering. We want 'em functional, but beautiful. And the average figure is bad." Not sure if he'd get away with the latter part of that statement in today's society, but honest, nonetheless. The article went on to say, "With the average figure in mind, Mr. Cole does swim shorts in elasticized shirred treatments which have the effect of a girdle."

After the war was over, French designer Louis Reard debuted the bikini, which exposed much more skin than its predecessor. He named it the "bikini" after the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, the site of U.S. nuclear tests. Simultaneously in 1946, Jacques Heim, another French designer, came out with his version of the bikini and called it the "atome" (French for atom) and donned it "the world's smallest bathing suit." Reard then advertised his suit as "smaller than the world's smallest bathing suit." It was still considered improper to reveal one's navel in the 40s, so although it was available, the bikini was not worn by the masses until much later. 

My Version of
Norma Kamali's Design

Norma Kamali's Fringed 40s Pin-up
Swimsuit on net-a-porter.com

Retro 40s pin-up style swimsuits are making a comeback this season. Designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, Chloé, and Dolce & Gabbana have all perfected the high-waisted two-piece delights. One of my favorite websites to virtually "window" shop is net-a-porter.com. I was recently looking for a retro swimsuit and stumbled across the most exquisite one I had ever laid eyes on, by Norma Kamali. After seeing its shocking price of  $1,500 (and no, your eyes are not deceiving you), I knew I'd have to attempt sewing it myself. I purchased black swimsuit fabric and 17 yards of fringe. I had no idea how tedious sewing all the layers and layers of fringe would be or the challenge of perfecting the fit until I started cutting and sewing. After many hours spent constructing this suit, I now understand why it is listed for $1,500. Actually, quite a bargain after all! The most ironic thing about this little treasure is that it states on net-a-porter.com, "To get the best from this Norma Kamali piece we advise you do not wear it to swim." Happy lounging (I wouldn't dare set foot in the water wearing mine)!

Mr Coffee

Randall Stephens

Americans' taste changes over time, like almost everything else, that is.

Witness the change in diet and the range of good eats available since the 1980s. The food and drink revolution of the 1980s and 1990s even introduced artisan cuisine to the Velveeta cheese belt. In the Midwest microbreweries began to crop up in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now most Americans who live near civilization can shop for extra virgin olive oil, goat cheese, and cracked-wheat bread at there local supermarket or by a plate of Rare Ahi Tuna with Wasabi Vinaigrette, garnished with some unidentifiable greenery, at an area bistro.

Long ago, we drank Folgers, Maxwell House, and instant coffee. Now, coffee chains have familiarized Americans with the wonders of Mediterranean, Sumatran, and Kenyan varieties. The rage for the exotic even extends into the bizarre. Several years back the ultra-rare Kopi Luwak made a splash, or should I say, plop.

Before the 1970s most Americans brewed coffee at home with inferior peculators. Enter Samuel Glazer, a founder of the company that rolled out Mr. Coffee in 1972. Glazer passed away earlier in March at the age of 89.

Over at NPR Robert Siegel and Oliver Strand of the NYT discuss the change that the Mr. Coffee drip machine wrought:

STRAND: They realized that there was an appliance that they could make that would produce filter coffee that was much cleaner, much sweeter and, frankly, much tastier than percolator coffee.

SIEGEL: Because that's the way that coffee was brewed on an industrial scale, if you will, for big companies and hotels.

STRAND: Yeah, there were these large batch brewers that were basically enormous versions of what we started to use in our homes; these little countertop plug-in coffee drippers.

SIEGEL: And so, he wasn't the engineer himself but they figured out let's get somebody to make a miniature version of a huge coffee brewer.

We raise our cups of Cà phê sữa đá (iced Vietnamese coffee) to you, Mr. Glazer!

Bernice Bobs Her Hair: Back to the Jazz Age

[Cross-post from Iron as Needed. Full disclosure: this is a post that my sister did at her wonderful blog on clothes making and the history of fashion. Full disclosure part 2: my sister talks a bit about my brother's band. Full disclosure part 3: the post shows pictures of my late granny in flapper gear. Blogging: a family affair? Yes.]

Nicole White

"Let us keep up the rules that flapperism is composed of--bobbed hair, short skirts and low-heeled shoes, giving the body plenty of room to expand itself and that free and easy swing that only a short skirt can afford. What do you say flappers?"

-Excerpt from a letter published in The Flapper magazine (1922) written by a Chicago flapper

Photograph of
my grandma in 1926

Jazz music, dancing, speakeasies, gansters, and, of course, flappers were all part of the twenties underground scene. The flapper emerged as the new, fancy-free woman of the decade with a carefree attitude and flare for style. She didn't care about the societal rules imposed on women and still kept her femininity while keeping up with the men. Flappers became such a sensation that there was even a magazine devoted to them called The Flapper, which embraced the same free spirit outlook as its readers and included the byline, "Not for Old Fogies." When Paris fashion tried to "impose" the long skirt on America in 1922, The Flapper was outraged and included the following at the end of an article titled, "Flappers Protest Dictation From Paris."

Any flapper reader of The Flapper magazine may fill out the following blank and mail it in as a token of her stand on Parisian dictation of styles. No names will be used; our only concern is to arrive at an accurate gauge of flapper opinion. Results of this referendum will be published in the November issue.
.............................................................................................................
The Flapper, 604 Ogden Bldg., Chicago, Ill.
Gentlemen: This is how I stand on continuation of present-day
styles. I am marking my preference with an X.

For Against

Bobbed Hair ____ ____
Rolled Sox ____ ____
Short Skirts ____ ____
Knickers ____ ____
Low-heeled Shoes ____ ____
Corsets ____ ____
Name............................................. Age.............
Street Address............................ City.............

Photograph of
my grandma in the 1920s

By the twenties, women were tired of wearing uncomfortable, stuffy clothing and were ready for a change. The loose fitting, drop-waist dresses became a staple in every flapper's wardrobe. Jeanne Lanvin and Coco Chanel were two influential fashion designers at the time that kept the "new breed" of women happy.

With the Great Gatsby remake to be released in December and Gucci, Marchesa, Ralph Lauren, and Alberta Ferretti, just to name a few, all sending twenties-inspired looks down the runway, this will be the year to celebrate flapper fashion. High-end designer dresses this spring will feature drop-waists, feathers, fringe, pleats, soft silks, and beading. One of the only fashion houses to not partake in this resurgence is Alexander McQueen. When recently asked about the up and coming trend, creative director Sarah Burton commented, "We’re not a house to do a dropped waist."

Fashion designers may be bringing the twenties back to the runway, but the Dave Stephens Band is bringing it to the stage. Kansas City became a famous jazz hub during the Jazz Age and the Dave Stephens Band is keeping it alive today by performing vintage delights such as Alexander's Ragtime Band, Puttin' on the Ritz, and Runnin' Wild. Their energetic, live shows take you back in time to a night in a past decade. The intimate experience feels so authentic that you half expect the police to burst through the doors like a speakeasy raid on the grounds that the crowd is having a little too much fun. The New York Times described Dave Stephens as "a jazz singer and songwriter based in Los Angeles whose perpetual smile, expansive gestures and habit of breaking into song unprovoked make him seem like a Broadway musical character." Cue the curtain!

I made a twenties-inspired dress this week and used a beautiful Marc Jacobs crepe de chine I purchased from Mood. It was my first time to work with a silk/lycra blend and it wasn't easy! It's similar to the dress I made last week . . . just a bit dressier.

Lascaux, Staffordshire, and the Serendipity of History

Heather Cox Richardson

On September 12, 1940, a dog named Robot ran away in southwestern France. Robot’s owner, the teenaged Marcel Ravidat, along with three of his buddies—Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas—set out to find him. They found not only the straying dog, but also 900 other animals, all painted on the walls and ceilings of a complex of caves near the village of Montignac.

These dramatic paintings of more than 2000 images in total—including abstract figures, animals, and one human figure—make up the Lascaux cave paintings. They are estimated to be more than 17,000 years old. They are the world’s most famous collection of Paleolithic art.

Extensive tourism to the site changed the environment of the caves and encouraged the growth of fungus and mold, forcing authorities to close the caves to protect them. But anyone interested can take an on-line tour of the caves at: http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/. One can only imagine the awe, and perhaps the growing fear, of the boys as they saw the giant horses, ibexes, and bison from thousands of years before thundering across the ceilings of the caves.

The serendipity of the discovery of the Lascaux caves reminds me of the 2009 discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found. In that case, Terry Herbert decided to try out his metal detector in a farm field close to his home. When it started to beep, he turned up not old beer cans, but more than 3,500 items of gold and silver, inset with precious stones, made in the 6th to 8th centuries C.E.

The treasures of Lascaux can help us to understand the first expressions of human culture, and those of Staffordshire the culture of Anglo-Saxon artistry and warfare. For a historian, though, their discovery also represents the extraordinary excitement of discovering something new and unexpected in the world around us.

New England's "Maruellous" Pine Trees

Heather Cox Richardson

How many people today have heard of the King’s Broad Arrow?

Not many, I’d wager, and yet it was once the key to settling a continent and the spark to a revolution. It’s a simple mark: three quick swings with an ax, one straight up and two in a V at the top, to make an arrow. After 1711, the King’s Mark branded old-growth New England white pines as the property of the King of England.

Those old-growth white pines were key to British interest in settling New England. In 1605, Captain George Weymouth explored the coast of what is now Maine, sailing the Archangel to Monhegan, Camden, and up the Kennebec River. He discovered vast shoals of fish and, as one of his comrades recorded, giant “firre-trees,” “out of which issueth Turpentine in so maruellous plenty, and so sweet, as our Chirurgeon and others affirmed they neuer saw so good in England. We pulled off much Gumme congealed on the outside of the barke, which smelted like Frankincense. This would be a great benefit for making Tarre and Pitch.”

The trees that so impressed Weymouth and his men were White Pines, (Pinus Strobus), still known in England as the Weymouth Pine.

These huge trees dominated the coastline where Weymouth sailed. They were the tallest trees in eastern North America, standing up to 230 feet. Their wood is soft, easy to cut, straight, and generally without knots. Unlike hardwood, it can stand for years without cracking, and it bends, rather than breaks, in a high wind. It was a perfect tree to make masts, and if there was one thing the Royal Navy needed, it was its own source of mast wood. As William R. Carlton put it in his 1939 New England Quarterly article titled “New England Masts and the King’s Navy”: “Masts, in the days of wooden ships, played a far greater part in world affairs than merely that of supporting canvas. They were of vital necessity to the lives of nations. Statesmen plotted to obtain them; ships of the line fought to procure them. . . .” They were vital to the well being of the British Navy . . . and thus to Britain itself.

The Navy had been getting its masts from the Baltic countries and Norway, but the masts they supplied had to be spliced, and the supply was always susceptible to disruption. The discovery of a new source of masts was enough to spur interest in settling New England. By 1623, entrepreneurs in Maine and New Hampshire were milling pine masts for British navy yards, a trade centered out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s “Strawberry Bank.”

After a war with the Dutch closed off British access to the Baltic in 1654, England began to rely on the Colonies to supply masts. The resulting boom in mast wood created a frenzy of cutting which threatened to decimate the old-growth trees. By 1691, the Crown had protected almost all white pines more than 24 inches in diameter at 12 inches above the ground. Surveyors marked these potential masts with the King’s Broad Arrow.

Colonists were outraged. Pine wood was valuable—very valuable—not only for masts but also for boards. Men routinely poached the pines, sawing the old-growth trunks into widths no more than 22 inches wide to get around the new laws. They also protested the restrictions, which were a real hardship in a region where wood was imperative for everything from houses to heat. They began to mutter that the Parliament had no right to intrude on their private property.

In 1772, a New Hampshire official tasked with protecting the King’s Trees charged six sawmill owners with milling trunks that had been marked with the King’s Broad Arrow. One of the owners refused to pay the resulting fine. He was arrested and then released with the promise that he would provide bail the next day. Instead, the following morning he and 30 to 40 men, their faces disguised with soot, assaulted the government officials and ran them out of town. While eight of the men were later charged with assault, the local judges who sentenced them let them off so lightly the verdict could easily be seen as support for their actions.

The Pine Tree Riot, as it came to be called, has often been cited as a precursor to the Boston Tea Party. The latter is the more famous occasion when New Englanders challenged royal authority, but it is worth noting that the first flag of the American Revolutionaries bore the image of a White Pine in the upper lefthand corner.

Eating Our Way through History Roundup

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Tim Carman, "With America Eats Tavern, Jose Andres offers bites of history," Washington Post, July 12, 2011

A few historic cookbooks from Jose Andres’s personal collection are displayed inside a hulking glass case at his new America Eats Tavern in the former Cafe Atlantico space. The chef is attempting to explain each volume — a notebook kept by George Washington’s chef, a “Chemistry of Cookery” tome that proves Harold McGee didn’t invent that field — when he can’t stand it anymore. He suddenly wraps his arms around the glass case, gives it a big bear hug and yanks it off the stand. He wants to paw through his books and actually show me what he’s talking about.>>>

Michael Knock, "History as an ingredient," Iowa City Press-Citizen, July 12, 2011

It's time for a little history. But don't worry, this is history you can really sink your teeth into.

The Johnson County Master Gardeners will host the 16th annual Taste of the Heritage Garden on July 20 at Plum Grove in Iowa City. The dinner, which runs from 5:30 to 7 p.m., offers the opportunity to learn a bit about Iowa's culinary history by letting attendees sample some of the foods and dishes our ancestors might have enjoyed.>>>

James McWilliams, "How 'Conscientious Carnivores' Ignore Meat's True Origins," Atlantic, July 12, 2011

. . . . The rationalization is that because factory farming is so horrifically brutal to animals, the conscientious carnivore can vote with his or her fork by purchasing meat from farmers who raise their animals in a more "humane" manner—free-range pork, grass-fed beef, cage-free eggs, and all that. The reality, however, is that the so-called conscientious consumers who support these alternative systems are doing very little to challenge the essence of factory farming. In fact, they may be strengthening its very foundation.>>>

Ann Treistman, "Eatymology: Our favorite summer foods, explained," Salon, July 9, 2011

Thinking about American cookery from its very roots reveals how nearly everything we eat came from Europe with settlers. It also makes very clear the elaborate -- and sometimes random -- updates and changes that have been made to these dishes. Brownies were once prepared without chocolate (is a brownie without chocolate really a brownie? you might ask). Pumpkin pie was made with rosemary, thyme and apples. Granula, a precursor to today's granola, was as hard as a rock and had to be soaked in milk before it was eaten. Biscuits went from twice-cooked pucks taken on ship journeys because they never became stale (they started out that way) to the flaky, buttery mounds we enjoy today. Peanuts for peanut butter were once boiled, not roasted. And there are dozens of variations on meatloaf; we added the ketchup and the cheese.>>>

San Francisco Moving Picture Time Machine

Randall Stephens

It's really hard to believe that 60 Minutes has been on the air since 1968. (In fact, you can watch original episodes in their entirety here.) This Sunday proved the show still has much to offer all these years later.

In a segment called "60 Minutes Rewind," the program turns its attention to a remastered film, an amazing, rare bit of footage from more than 100 years ago. Way back when two clever filmmakers decided to mount a camera to the front of a trolly car that was rattling down Market Street. The footage is astonishing. I'm thinking about using it in my fall course, the United States from Reconstruction to World War I. Like this 1848 daguerreotype of Cincinnati, the moving pictures might encourage class discussion on what we can learn about a large American city from this film from so long ago. (See also how the story follows the sort of digging, investigation historians have to do.) Have a look and see what you think . . .

A Day in the Life: Art and History

Heather Cox Richardson

Everyone knows the iconic image of John, Paul, George, and Ringo from the cover of Abbey Road. That image launched deep investigations into its hidden meanings—“Paul is Dead,” anyone?—and into the stories it might be telling about the Beatles.

There was a story behind the image, too, and it’s one in which art and history intersect. As with any photo shoot, at the August 1969 session with the Beatles, the photographer Iain Macmillan took a number of different shots. They swept in bystanders, cars, different expressions on the musicians’ faces, different interactions.

What can these photos tell us about history?

I wonder, not only because it’s Friday, but because of another treasure trove of images recently discovered in Chicago. Vivian Maier was an emigrant from France in the 1930s and worked as a child in a New York sweatshop. When she was older, she worked as a nanny in Chicago. She had few friends, apparently, and interacted with the world largely through her camera. She left her photos, largely unseen, in a storage locker in Chicago, which put them up for sale when her payments became overdue after her death. John Maloof, writing an Images of America book about a Chicago neighborhood, bought them.

What he found was, to my mind, incredible. These are simply stunning pieces of art, chronicling the world of the streets in Chicago, primarily, as well as New York and distant countries. Her use of line, light, and texture is extraordinary.

Her photos are works of art, but they are also unusual snapshots of life in the mid-twentieth century. What can they tell us about the world in her era?

The historical reading of photographs intended to tell a societal story is straightforward compared to reading the Abbey Road photos or the Vivian Maier collection. Jacob Riis was making a point about urban poverty; Nick Ut was making a point about the Vietnam War with his 1972 image of Kim Phuc. A recent article honoring the late Tim Hetherington suggested that the key to successful war photography was an understanding of the complexity of the conflict and the ability to capture images encapsulating that story.

Artists, of course, have a different imperative. Their stories are not, necessarily, driven by current societal concerns. But if art historians can use paintings to interpret the world in which the images were made, shouldn’t historians be able to use artistic photography to interpret the modern world? And if so, how?

What can the Abbey Road photos tell us about their era?

The Physicality of the Past

Morgan Hubbard

Digital media have made the historian's job easier, no question. Documents once sequestered in archives are now available instantly to the researcher with a laptop and some savvy. The W. E. B. Du Bois collection at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a great example. The entirety of the collection is being digitized; when the project is complete, every document in the collection will be available, free and searchable, online.

True, the vast majority of historical sources aren't yet available digitally, and probably never will be, because the cost of scanning and hosting is too great. But even then, technology has made inroads on insularity. Need to see some documents in an archive in Dublin but don't have the money to get there? Find some blogs, make some connections, beg a favor, and see if a colleague across the Atlantic won't take a day to find what you need and send you the scans. Promise this new colleague a like service when she requests material from archives near you. Do this a few times, and suddenly you're plugged into a network of researchers that mostly erases the geographical distance between you and the historical sources you need.

But there might be a cost to this process—as Robert A. Heinlein said, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Digital research removes certain sense perceptions from the researcher's tool kit. A screen can't communicate touch or feel, or the way light plays on a page, or the musty smell of long-unopened books. But, you assert, this is all secondary to what the documents say, which should be the researcher's foremost concern. This is true. But I argue that the physicality of sources is, if not crucial to our craft, at least important enough to merit consideration.

Take these pages from the July 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The paper's yellowed, which is to be expected for a magazine printed cheaply on pulp paper (this fact in itself is an interesting commentary on the business of mass-market fiction magazines in America after WWII.) And see there, that splotch over Heinlein's first name? That's mustard. You can see more traces of mustard above and below. And on the facing page, right at the bottom, is a fleck of onion. Someone, somewhere, was eating a sandwich while reading this magazine.

The mustard and the onion don't change the meaning of this document. What they do is maybe more profound—they connect us to the material reality of the past, and to the people who experienced it. The mustard and the onion remind us that this collection of words was more than an expression of deep historical trends. This magazine was a set of stories, read by a real person for real reasons, which, hard though they may be to ascertain, are very much of interest to historians like me. The magazine's physical presence is a reminder that as historians we have an obligation not just to abstract notions like evenhandedness, but to the people of the past whose stories we're trying to tell.

TANSTAAFL photo courtesy of UMass Science Fiction Society
Magazine photo by Morgan Hubbard, 2010